A Story of Connection: Links to My Japanese Heritage

The Human Rights Group at the 2024 Leadership in Action Culmination Ceremony. From left to right: Josiah Hankerson, Krystal Tran, Lexie Morita, Rianna Marquez, and Landa Hong.

I have always been proud to be American. Being American meant that I had certain, “unalienable” rights, such as the freedoms of speech and the press, and when I was younger, I thought everyone owned those rights and had always owned them. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Freedom is not guaranteed and has never been. There have been people who did not reap the benefits of our free nation. There have been people who did not have basic human rights. 

Kizuna truly opened my eyes to the struggles that many different people go through and have gone through in the past, focusing specifically on the hardships faced by Asian Americans. Throughout a ten-week course, seven different groups of teenage students chose seven different civil liberties topics – the topics they found most pressing and significant to their unique situation. I wound up working with four wonderful, intelligent, passionate people and, together, we became the human rights group of the 2024 Kizuna Leadership in Action program. We strove to create a project that would promote equal human rights – and to speak out for those who felt they could not fight for themselves. 

Why human rights? I chose to focus on this issue simply because it is such a broad topic. Human rights are everyone’s rights, and I believe that all people should have the ability to exercise them on a daily basis. Immigrants, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, those of all races, ages, and backgrounds… they are all human, and their civil liberties all fit under the blanket category of human rights. 

The Leadership in Action program lasted just ten weeks, stretching from January to the end of March. In this time, the seven groups were each given a stipend of $1,000 to fund their vision for a project – a project that would hopefully highlight the struggles of Asians living in America while staying true to their overall rights topic. Because the goal of this program, I believe, was to inspire leaders in the Asian American – especially the Japanese American – community. It was to educate the younger generation about the adversity Asian Americans went through and are still going through, even to this day, and the program accomplished that. Through the powerful guest speakers, each of us saw the actions people were taking to change others’ view on those of Asian descent. Through the projects we created, we were encouraged to learn and to take action ourselves. 

Each group had a different vision. My human rights group wanted to go back to the basics and start simple. We linked our ideas with Kizuna’s mission and focused on the education aspect, striving to enlighten children about the topic of the Japanese American concentration camps. Our goal was to inform kids that the camps were an atrocious violation of human rights - of the human rights of our own American citizens, and the five of us agreed that children are the voice of our future. They are the ones who are going to lead the human population into the events that await us, whatever they may be.

So our idea was, if we teach them young, we will be doing our part to ensure that something similar to the Japanese American incarceration never happens again, and we endeavored to teach them through a short picture book that followed the life of a young Japanese American boy who struggled through the concentration camps. Through the words of the manuscript, we hoped to convey our message of desperation and hope for the future. This book, called Kizuna, after the organization that made it possible, was the central piece of our project, along with a website that carried more information on the terrible time of the Japanese American concentration camps. Our team managed to launch the website and self-publish the book all before the Leadership in Action program was over. 

The 2024 LiA Human Rights Group working on their project throughout the 10-week program

However, our journey to success was not without its difficulties. We were five different people with varying, sometimes conflicting, ideas. It was not easy to merge all these thoughts into a cohesive project we could all get behind. This program was largely team-based and the key to strong progress was combining ideas and working together. And personally, I faced struggles of my own. I was designated as the writer of our children’s book and was given a mere couple of weeks to draft up the entire manuscript, as we needed time to illustrate and publish the book. I remember feelings of stress as I worked through each line, trying to tell the story while staying true to the message we wanted to convey. I had to scrap at least five different drafts before coming up with one satisfactory enough to publish. 

But this meant that I learned something valuable. I was faced with adversity in my writing, and I was forced to figure out how to deal. How to cope and push through because my group was relying on my work. And through the hardships of joining the wants of each member, my communication skills improved vastly, both in person and online. These might seem like simple obstacles, but, with our ten-week deadline, stress built up. However, in retrospect, every hurdle can, in reality, be seen as something to be absorbed and used in future situations.

The Kizuna Leadership in Action program gave me so much – learning experiences and opportunities to socialize with other teenagers just as passionate as myself. But the most priceless gift this program presented me with was the connection it gave me to my Japanese side. I am Japanese American. Living in America, I never really got much of a chance to connect with my Japanese heritage, regardless of the fact that my dad was born and raised in Japan. The Leadership in Action program changed that. It gave me an outlet in which to learn about the side of me I never thought to explore before, and this meant everything to me, as someone who has Japanese roots on both sides of my family. Getting to delve into my Japanese heritage is something I will treasure forever. 

Yes, I have always been proud to be American, and now I know exactly what that means – the rights we are all given. But, thanks to the Leadership in Action program, I can say that I am so proud to be Japanese American. Thank you, my Kizuna family, for all of the eye-opening experiences you exposed me to. Thank you for giving me this chance.

2024 LiA Cohort's First Session

Preview of Kizuna: A Story of Connection